Description
FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST WIFE AND OTHER STORIES, INSCRIBED BY PEARL BUCK AND ADDITIONALLY SIGNED BY RICHARD WALSH, PEARL BUCK’S PUBLISHER, FUTURE HUSBAND, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE INTRODUCTION
BUCK, Pearl S. The First Wife and Other Stories. New York: John Day, (1933). Octavo, original tan cloth, pictorial endpapers, original dust jacket.
First edition, inscribed on the half title: “For Bob and Natalie, Pearl S. Buck” and additionally signed by Buck’s publisher, future husband, and the author of the introduction, Richard J. Walsh, the president of The John Day Company.
Published just two years after Pearl Buck’s widely successful novel The Good Earth, The First Wife and Other Stories is a collection of 14 short stories set in China and divided into three thematic groupings: “Old and New,” or stories contrasting East and West; “Revolution,” or stories discussing the rise of Communism; and “Flood,” or stories dealing with the devastating Yangtse flood of 1931, which affected over 25 million people. This copy is most desirable as it bears both Pearl Buck’s inscription and signature as well as the signature of Richard J. Walsh, the president of The John Day Company, which published all of Buck’s most important work. Although Pearl Buck had been unhappy in her first marriage for some time, as her “literary reputation grew, her estrangement from her husband increased. During a one-year visit to the United States in 1932 to meet her American public while her husband completed his doctoral studies at Cornell, her publisher, Richard Walsh, admitted that he had fallen in love with his best-selling author. Unhappily married himself, Walsh asked her to consider divorce and remarriage. Buck refused, and for the next three years Walsh pursued the relationship, following his top writer halfway around the world and back” (Pribic, 69). In 1935, they finally divorced their spouses and married each other, remaining together until Walsh’s death in 1960.
Book with scattered light foxing to text and mild toning to spine. Dust jacket with a bit of shallow chipping to spine ends, toning to spine. An extremely good copy, most desirable thus inscribed and signed.
